The School and the University: An International Perspective

By Burton R. Clark

This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1985.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of California Press
• Release date: Nov 15, 2023
• ISBN: 9780520334038

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The School and the University

The School

and the University

An International Perspective

Edited by

Burton R. Clark

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS

Berkeley • Los Angeles • London

University of California Press

Berkeley and Los Angeles, California

University of California Press, Ltd.

London, England

Copyright © 1985 by The Regents of the University of California

Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data

Main entry under title:

The School and the university.

Includes index.

1. Education, Higher—Congresses. 2. Comparative

education—Congresses. I. Clark, Burton R.

LB2301.S36 1985 378 85-1158

ISBN 0-520-5423-7 (alk. paper)

Printed in the United States of America

123456789

Contents

Contents

Acknowledgments

Contributors

Introduction

1 France

2 The Federal Republic of Germany

3 England and Wales

4 Sweden

5 Japan

6 The People’s Republic of China

7 Latin America

8 Africa

9 The United States

10 Teacher Education in the United States

11 Conclusions

Conference Participants

Index

Acknowledgments

As EDITOR OF THIS VOLUME I am particularly indebted to the ten colleagues who prepared the basic papers and, after critical review, revised them for publication. Chosen for their expertise on education in nine countries and continents, and representing a half-dozen nationalities, the authors faced a difficult task in responding to my request for parallel categories and comparative statements. I believe their efforts deserve an integrated presentation to a larger audience.

The authors of the papers and I are indebted to the other seventeen participants in a four-day seminar held at the University of California, Los Angeles, in July 1983, who prepared critiques of the papers and discussed their strengths and weaknesses. Their criticisms deepened our working knowledge and broadened our comparative capacity on a perplexing and troubling topic. The participants in the conference are listed at the end of this volume.

The Exxon Education Foundation generously provided the funds that supported the 1983 conference and made possible this volume. I want particularly to thank Robert Payton, President, and Arnold Shore, Program Officer, for their continued faith in the effort of the UCLA Comparative Higher Education Research Group to improve the state of the art in the comparative study of higher education. Their support has helped build an international community of scholars whose critical comments and published work help inform the wider public about the growing complexities of modern educational systems.

This volume is the third in a series of efforts to devise useful comparative statements about higher education. The first volume, The Higher Education System: Academic Organization in Cross-National Perspective, was published by the University of California Press in 1983. It drew upon the working knowledge I had developed during the 1970s, particularly from the many empirical investigations of the Yale Higher Education Research Group I chaired between 1974 and 1980. The second volume, Perspectives on Higher Education: Eight Disciplinary and Comparative Views, drawn from a 1982 UCLA conference, was published by the University of California Press in 1984. A fourth effort will follow on the subject of the academic profession.

In the selection of topics and experts for this collective effort, I was joined particularly by Gary Rhoades (United States), Maurice Kogan (United Kingdom), and Ladislav Cerych (France). Patricia Carlson served superbly as conference organizer for our summer meeting. Adele Ha- litsky Clark ably provided the general editing that helped shape the papers of the volume for a wider audience. It is a pleasure to thank all the above for their contribution.

Burton R. Clark

Santa Monica, California February 1984

Contributors

BURTON R. CLARK is Allan M. Cartter professor of higher education and sociology and chairman of the Comparative Higher Education Research Group, University of California, Los Angeles. He taught previously at Stanford University, Harvard University, University of California, Berkeley, and Yale University in departments of sociology and schools of education, serving as chairman of the sociology department at Yale between 1969 and 1972 and as chairman of the Yale Higher Education Research Group, 1974-1980. His publications include: The Open Door College, 1960; The Distinctive College, 1970; Academic Power in Italy, 1977; The Higher Education System, 1983; and (editor) Perspectives on Higher Education, 1984.

WILLIAM K. CUMMINGS is centerwide fellow in international education, East-West Center, Hawaii. Since taking his Ph.D. in sociology at Harvard University in 1972, he has taught at Tsuda College in Tokyo, the University of Chicago, and the National University of Singapore. He has served as a Ford Foundation project specialist in educational research and planning with the Indonesian Ministry of Education and Culture. His publications include: Nihon no Daigaku Kyoiyu (The Japanese University Professor), 1972; The Changing Japanese University, edited with Ikuo Amano and Kazuyuki Kitamura, 1979; and Education and Equality in Japan, 1980.

LARS EKHOLM is director of higher education and head of department in the Ministry of Education and Cultural Affairs, Stockholm, Sweden. Since completing his doctoral thesis in history at the University of Uppsala in 1974, he has served in various posts in the Office of the Chancellor of the Swedish Universities and in the Higher Education Department he now heads. He has been chairman or member of a number of com missions and working groups in the fields of higher education and health care in Sweden and has served as a representative of the Swedish government in various European conferences on higher education.

PHILIP FOSTER is professor of education and sociology, State University of New York, Albany. English by birth, he completed his first degree in economics at the London School of Economics; he took his Ph.D. in comparative education at the University of Chicago in 1962. He has taught at the University of Chicago, where he has also served as director of the Comparative Education Center, and at Macquarie University in Australia. His principal publications include: Education and Social Change in Ghana, 1965; The Fortunate Few, with Remi Clignet, 1967; and Ghana and the Ivory Coast, edited with Aristide Zolberg, 1971.

MARGARET MADEN is director of the Islington Sixth Form Centre, London. After taking her postgraduate certificate in education at the University of London in 1963, she has been a teacher and an administrator in four different schools in London and Oxfordshire as well as serving as lecturer in education at the University of London. Since 1967 she has been a senior officer in the British National Union of Teachers, chaired the Programme for Reform in Secondary Education (1975-78), contributed chapters on the teaching profession to a number of volumes on British education, and contributed regularly to the Times Educational Supplement, the Guardian, the Times, and BBC television and radio programs.

GUY NEAVE has served since 1976 as director of research for the Institute of Education and Social Policy of the European Cultural Foundation, Paris and Brussels. After completing his Ph.D. in French political history at University College, London, in 1967, he taught modern European history for several years and then converted to a career as a researcher in the sociology of education. He has served in numerous consultancies on education in Europe. His publications include: How They Fared, 1975; Patterns of Equality, 1976; and Education and the European Community 1963—1982 (in preparation).

STANLEY ROSEN is assistant professor of political science, University of Southern California. Before and after taking his Ph.D. in political science at the University of California, Los Angeles, in 1979, he traveled frequently to Hong Kong and the People’s Republic of China, where he also spent four years on research for his dissertation between 1972 and 1976. An active participant in conferences on contemporary China, his early publications include: The Role of Sent-Down Youth in the Chinese Cultural Revolution, 1981; Red Guard Factionalism and the Cultural Revolution in Guangzhou, 1982; and Policy Conflicts in Contemporary China, edited with John P. Burn, forthcoming.

ERNESTO SCHIEFELBEIN is a senior researcher in the Centro de Investigación y Desarrollo de la Educación (CIDE) and coordinator of the educational research exchange network (REDUC), both located in Santiago, Chile. He took his first degree in economics at the University of Chile in 1959 and his Ph.D. in educational planning at Harvard University ten years later. A former head of the Chilean Educational Planning Office during 1965-1970, he has taught in Latin American universities and has been Visiting Professor of Educational Planning in Developing Countries at Harvard. He has held a number of research posts in education and economic development and has served as a consultant to the World Bank and UNESCO. His publications include over twenty essays and articles in English on education in Latin America, and he is coauthor of Development of Educational Planning Models.

CAROL STOCKING is study director in the Center for the Study of Social Policy, Chicago. Before taking her Ph.D. in sociology at the University of Chicago in 1978, she served for fourteen years as a survey research director in the National Opinion Research Center. Since 1978 she has worked, with James S. Coleman, on major national longitudinal studies of high school and beyond students. Her recent research papers on education include reports on the characteristics of good schools and the comparison of Japanese and American high school students.

GARY SYKES is a graduate student in the Graduate School of Education, Stanford University. Early in his career he taught mathematics and English in two New Jersey secondary schools. Interrupting his work toward a Ph.D., he served for seven years (1976-83) as research associate and then team leader in planning research on teaching in the National Institute of Education. In addition to many conference reports and articles, his publications include: Value Conflicts and Curriculum Issues, with J. Schaffarzick (1979); Handbook of Teaching and Policy, with Lee Shulman (1983); and The Condition of Teaching, forthcoming.

ULRICH TEICHLER is director of the Center for Research on Higher Education and Work (Wissenschaftliches Zentrum für Berufs—und Hochschulforschung), Kassel, and professor in the Department for Applied Social Science, Comprehensive University of Kassel (Gesamthochschule Kassel), Federal Republic of Germany. He took his Ph.D. in 1975 after completing a doctoral dissertation on education and social status in Japan and has been research fellow in the Max Planck Institute for Educational Research in Berlin from 1968 to 1978. Since joining the Comprehensive University of Kassel, he served two years as university vice-president. His many publications in English include: Admission to Higher Education in the United States, 1978; Higher Education and the Needs of Society, with Dirk Hartung and Reinhard Nuthmann, 1980; and Higher Education and the Labour Market in the Federal Republic of Germany, with Bikas C. Sanyal, 1982.

Introduction

BURTON R. CLARK

WE MAY CONCEIVE OF THE relation between secondary and higher education at the outset as a two-way street along which the nature of traffic in one direction is quite different from the flow of people and activities in the other. Up the street, from the school to the university, we encounter primarily a flow of students. The school selects them, trains them, orients them, certifies their competence, and sends them on. The student traffic may be heavy or light: in access to higher education, the question of quantity is always present. Those allowed into the flow may be only the most able or virtually all who wish to try: issues of quality and equality are inherent. Whatever the quantity and the quality, and the degree of opportunity, the school clearly shapes the human resources made available to the university. In education, generally, an impelling principle of sequence gives lower units this particular role in determining the nature of higher levels.¹

Down the street, from the university to the school, the traffic is different, consisting always of two major vehicles of influence. One is personnel: in one form or another the institutions of higher education select, train, orient, and help certify the teachers and administrators who staff the schools. In a primitive sense the school can be no better in quality of personnel than what the university will allow it to be. A second vehicle is curricular in nature: the university sets course requirements for its own students, and often itself sets entry requirements that influence what teachers will teach and what students will study in the school. Students who want to go on must master those materials and pass those examinations that permit them to be a part of the upward flow.

These streams of influence are inescapable, always a part of educational systems. But they vary in their nature and efficacy from one society to another, and, in each nation, from one time to another. They can be cast in forms and procedures that are relatively stable and widely accepted, even firmly institutionalized over long periods of time. But they can also be in flux and in doubt. Since about 1960 the highly industrialized nations, and many developing societies, have moved into a problematic stage. In a context of expansion and growing complexity at each level, officials, scholars, teachers, and citizens alike have become uncertain about how to distribute students from secondary to tertiary education. Some countries are sorely troubled by the problems of preparing and distributing teachers and of defining school curricula that articulate with the requirements of postsecondary institutions. Practitioners and observers become aware that the upward and downward flows of influence may interact in ways that generate a vicious rather than a virtuous circle of effects, especially in the quality of student and teacher performance. Where the vicious circle is currently strongest, the benefits of expansion and variety have clearly brought in their wake some major educational and social costs that are as undesired as they were unanticipated.

The huge American system of education has cut the problems of the school-university relationship on a grand scale, managing periodically to excite public attention to the level of grave concern, even a sense of crisis. That sense centers on a perception that something is fundamentally wrong with the American secondary school. It includes more than a faint suspicion that higher education has contributed to the steering of secondary education into a major weakness of the American system. And the sense of crisis has its most sensitive nerve in invidious international comparisons. In the years immediately after Sputnik, it was a concern about the apparent success of the Russians in the preparation of scientists and engineers. In the early 1980s it has centered on a nation at risk² in economic competition with other countries, Japan in particular. In search of the basic defects of the American school, numerous studies have been initiated, with over a half-dozen major commission reports and research volumes issued in 1983 and early 1984.³ Dozens of recommendations have been floated, many reminiscent of those offered twenty-five years ago that led to little or no lasting beneficial reform. Major universities and colleges have established new programs and new institutional linkages with the intent of helping at least some secondary schools improve themselves, toward ensuring a flow of better-prepared students in the transition from school to university.

Thus, in the United States in particular, but also in other countries more generally, the question of how these two major levels of education interact and shape each other is a practical as well as a theoretical issue. On both grounds the question is one to which answers should be sought steadily and systematically. Public concern is volatile, affected by a crowded agenda of national and international issues, and when that concern in a particular country dies down, as it has before and will again, the question still remains important. At home and abroad the linkages between these two levels of education will never be simple again. The connections, we may safely assert, become more numerous, often more indirect, and always more ambiguous: they will continue to be problematic, recalcitrant to the touch of the easy answer and the quick reform. Thus, when the momentary headlines have vanished, steady inquiry should remain. There is much to be done in contemporary research beyond the national reports that multiply in times of perceived crisis.

The purpose of this volume is to look broadly at the relation between secondary and higher education in a way that can enlarge practical and theoretical perspectives and thereby possibly lead to greater insight. Basic to our approach is cross-national comparison: to ensure breadth that reaches beyond one’s own system, the chapters that follow range far afield, across continents as well as specific countries. We thereby first learn quite simply how things are done elsewhere and then gain genuine points of comparison that allow us to observe some fundamental similarities and differences among national modes of education. We learn about our own system by standing outside it and perceiving it in a larger frame. The larger picture, at first seemingly more remote, usefully turns the mind toward empirical detail. If we study only our own educational system, our statements about its strengths and weaknesses, its basic nature and distinctive features, commonly contain, often implicitly, comparisons to either an ideal system of affairs or to imagined features of other countries. Even simple descriptions of actual practices elsewhere then become a definite improvement, particularly when the practices are shown to be interconnected and embedded in tradition and deeply rooted structure.

We have also sought breadth by seeking to identify a number of significant aspects of the two-way stream of influence. By what means other than the flow of students does the school shape the university? And beyond teacher training and some curricular determination, what else does higher education do directly or indirectly that significantly molds the secondary system? Articulation between the two levels is almost everywhere seen as an issue largely of curricular continuity and smooth flow of students. Yet other connections may be of equal or greater importance. If they exist in latent or manifest form, an international search is an appropriate way to ferret them out.

Our international coverage extends over seven highly industrialized countries, all of Latin America, and much of Africa. Among the advanced democracies, we selected three major European powers, the United Kingdom, France, and the Federal Republic of Germany, each significant internationally as a center of learning. We also included Sweden as a small country that has been at the cutting edge of educational change in recent decades, a laboratory of educational reform in which research and public policy have been closely connected. Experts in these four countries have at hand vital information about the school-university relationship, together offering an account that is at once varied and integrated, marked with sharp differences among four traditions but, in a worldwide frame, sharing features of advanced systems that have a European heritage. In these chapters, for example, we have the chance to study closely the special role selective tracks in upper secondary education play in Europe in defining the nature and quality of the secondary level, including the prestige of schoolteaching and teacher preparation. Even after major reforms during the last twenty years, these European systems, each in its own way, continue to have structures and procedures that stand in marked contrast to American ones, particularly to the comprehensive school that has come to dominate the American secondary level.

Moving away from Europe, Japan is an imposing world power that is increasingly central in international comparisons. In the late 1970s and early 1980s, it seems as though half the world has been trying to figure out how to catch up with the Japanese in education and industry. We, too, want to know more about how schools and universities in that country operate and relate to one another, particularly in coupling secondary schools that are apparently both universal and academically effective with a system of higher education that is large, differentiated, and virtually as open to age-group participation as the American. The Japanese way, as we shall see, is rooted in a combination of tough examinations for entry to the secondary level and competition and prestige hierarchy among secondary schools, as well as severe examinations for entry into the best universities. Schooling in Japan is a stubborn institutional phenomenon in its own right, driving the motivations of parents and students as much as it is in turn driven by the often-noted educational ambitions of the Japanese family.

Another three chapters plunge into the Third World. Research on education in the People’s Republic of China has blossomed in the early 1980s, and there is much to be learned from the dramatic story of vast swings in educational policy in the world’s largest country. We also learn what it is like for young people to attempt to make their way through the secondary level and on to higher education in a huge country where the rate of college entrance approximates 1 percent. The concept of the keypoint secondary school is a striking one that we are able to apply to the phenomenon of sharply selective academic schools in other countries . Latin America remains a fascinating laboratory of educational experiments and developments among the more advanced of the developing societies, with the relation between secondary and higher education often centrally in question. There, expansion has been enormous, moving at a rate far in excess of the doubling, tripling, and quadrupling of enrollments in higher education which occurred in Europe and America in the last two decades. Nonetheless, the universities dominate the schools more than ever, laying claim to an unusually large share of the money made available for education. Anglophonic Africa is yet another story, one of educational tragedy, in which high expectations for educational development, stimulated from the outside as well as from within, have been dashed on the hard rocks of population explosion, insufficient economic resources, and political repression and mismanagement. To think cross-nationally from the vantage point of China, or of nations in Latin America or in Africa, is to open new vistas in comprehending the range of possible relations between the school and university. The wider comparisons serve to highlight the special features of advanced industrial societies.

The coverage of countries and continents concludes with two chapters on the United States. This complex, ambiguous, and confusing case first requires a chapter that describes the enormous variety of structures and practices as they appear among fifty highly decentralized states. This chapter (chapter nine) also maps the links connecting schools to universities and the many ways students can negotiate this transition. Amidst the confusing details, some general patterns may be discerned. Chapter ten is devoted to a central aspect of the American system which becomes more troublesome with each passing decade: the nature of the teaching profession and the state of teacher education. Here we observe a vicious circle of effects difficult to arrest and reverse, a major point to which we return in the concluding chapter.

The chapters that follow are for the most part formed around some parallel subjects that facilitate cross-national comparisons. Each describes in some detail the systems of secondary and higher education as a necessary background for all who are not experts on education in the country or continent at hand. Each speaks to the question of how the school shapes the university, mainly analyzing the flow of students and problems of access to higher education, but also sometimes branching off into such topics as how unions and associations of secondary school teachers influence public policy on higher education. And each chapter turns to the issue of how the university shapes the school, in particular taking up the nature of teacher selection and training and the effects of university requirements and examinations on school curricula. But each author also varies his or her approach and selects issues within these broad categories according to what is important in the country in question. Each author’s imagination and insight operate freely within the general framework.

A significant analytical category that emerges in the volume is the growth of a third element, a set of practices, agencies, and professional groups that mediate between schools and universities, particularly those public agencies in some countries and private associations in others which write and administer examinations. The case can readily be made, as in Ulrich Teichler’s interpretation of the German system, that the state examination apparatus is indeed an imposing mediating element, one that is not directly within the control of the school or the university; or, as in Lars Ekholm’s account of Swedish education, that there is a marking and grading system that takes on virtually a life of its own as part of the political determination of public policy; or, as in Carol Stocking’s grasp of the American system, that a congeries of mediating bodies have emerged to bridge the gap between increasingly separate secondary and postsecondary systems.

The most important analytical problem that emerged in constructing the volume was how to remain centered on the relationship between the two levels of education while taking into account the important external forces and trends that shape the development of one or the other level, or both. Our solution is three-sided. First, we have retained the initial focus, since it allows for systematic comparisons that might lead to insight and some minimal generalizing. We have set our faces against doing yet another book on education and society which would loosely roam across the many connections of education to the economy, the polity, the social class system, the church, the family, demographic shifts, the cultures of adolescence, and so on. Second, we have sought to weave some of the more significant external relations and influences around the primary focus. If the school is heavily shaped by a vigorous adolescent culture, then analysis should center on its impact on the school-university relationship. Finally, we have attempted to view those who staff schools and institutions of higher education as active agents rather than as merely passive recipients of irresistible demands; that is, as actors who perceive and react to some outside groups but not to others and who translate outside demands into actions within the school or the university which affect the relationship of the one to the other. The relation between education and society, or more precisely between parts of one and parts of the other, may thus be seen as itself a twoway street, with the school-university relationship inducing or otherwise shaping a so-called external demand. For example, a higher education system that formally admits only 1 percent—or 10 percent—of the age group will cause the great mass of students at the elementary and secondary levels not to expect ready access, thereby shaping the expectations of families and young people in the most basic way possible.

Throughout this volume we sometimes use the metaphor school to indicate the entire secondary school system of a nation and the metaphor university for the higher education system. These terms clear the mind, simplify our prose, and thereby aid communication. But they carry the twin dangers of confusing the individual institution with an entire system and particularly of giving an impression of simplicity in what are ever more complex sets of institutions and practices. All educational systems of any magnitude and any significant degree of modernity contain different types of secondary schools, even in the United States, where the effort to group the young in public, comprehensive high schools has been under way for a half-century or more. And higher education has normally consisted not of universities alone but also of various nonuniversity sectors and enterprises, sometimes for purposes of elite recruitment and training, as in the leading grandes écoles of France, or, more widely, to handle technological fields and teacher training. Such differentiation is considerable in Japan, which has junior colleges and a wide range of private colleges, and great in the United States, where only several hundred institutions among some three thousand do research and give the Ph.D. and otherwise fully qualify as modern universities. Such internal variation will normally be made clear and appropriate terms used; but the limitations of our occasional use of school and university should be kept in mind.

The concluding chapter has three goals. One is to make some general observations, rooted in what we have learned across nations, about how schools and universities are connected and thereby shape one another. For example, we note that clear, direct connections between the two levels follow from intensive tracking at the secondary level. To reduce tracking is, for good or bad, to blur the linkages. Similarly, the reduction of tracking tends to reduce the prestige of schoolteaching, another outcome that apparently has not been much anticipated in reforms that favor the elimination of streaming in the upper secondary years. A second goal is to clarify a particular vulnerability of the American system against the backdrop of the experiences of other countries. As reflected in the conditions of schoolteaching and the recruitment problems of the teaching profession, the secondary school has been a distinctive American problem for some decades. Why is it so problematic? There is a confluence of conditions in the school and in the university and in the rest of postsecondary education which show up sharply in international relief, ones that together spell a circle of effects that reduces quality. These conditions need not be fully repeated in other countries, nor will they be. But other national systems edge toward the American problem as they make first the school and then the university more accessible and load each with more expectations, responsibilities, and tasks. What was elite work becomes mass work, and things are never the same again, particularly the status of schoolteaching and the conditions under which teachers work.

The third goal of chapter eleven is to identify one or more basic trends that deeply affect all educational systems and thereby alter the schooluniversity relationship. The key trend is complexity. The tasks of education multiply in number and, individually and collectively, become more complex. The scale of operations expands significantly. It follows that the agendas of the school and the university diverge, rendering the relation of the two more ambiguous and more problematic. It is not only the United States that is, and will be, troubled. Everywhere there is an erosion of certainty. In the face of growing complexity, the structures of schooling are pushed and pulled in contradictory directions. Are the young to be educated in common secondary schools or in different types of schools, even ones that compete for prestige? Should students in higher education be grouped as much as possible in comprehensive universities that attempt to embrace the universe or ought they be divided by rule or personal choice among many kinds of postsecondary education? More than ever, nations face the integration and differentiation of secondary and higher education, and the linkages between them, as central problems. The growing complexity of educational tasks will not allow it to be otherwise.

Notes

1 . For a general statement of this principle, see Green, Predicting the Behavior of the Education System, pp. 8-9.

2 . National Commission on Excellence in Education, A Nation At Risk.

3 . National Commission on Excellence in Education, A Nation At Risk; Task Force on Education for Economic Growth, Action for Excellence; Goodlad, A Place Called School; Boyer, High School; College Entrance Examination Board, Academic Preparation for College; The Twentieth Century Fund, Making the Grade; Ravitch, The Troubled Crusade; Sizer, Horace’s Compromise.

Bibliography

BOYER, ERNEST, L. High School: A Report on Secondary Education in America. New York: Harper and Row, 1983.

College Entrance Examination Board. Academic Preparation for College: What Students Need to Know and Be Able to Do. New York: CEEB, 1983.

GOODLAD, JOHN I. A Place Called School. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1983.

GREEN, THOMAS F. Predicting the Behavior of the Education System, Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse University Press, 1980.

National Commission on Excellence in Education. A Nation at Risk: The Imperative for Educational Reform. Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1983.

RAViTCH, DIANE. The Troubled Crusade: American Education, 1945-1980. New York: Basic Books, 1983.

SIZER, THEODORE R. Horace’s Compromise: The Dilemma of the American High School. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1984.

Task Force on Education for Economic Growth. Action for Excellence: A Comprehensive Plan to Improve our Nation’s Schools. Denver: Education Commission of the States, 1983.

Twentieth Century Fund. Making the Grade: Report of the Twentieth Century Fund Task Force on Federal Elementary and Secondary Education Policy. New York, 1983.

1

France

GUY NEAVE

FRANCE, OVER THE PAST TWO decades or more, and in common with most Western European countries, has been faced with the twin imperatives of meeting growing individual demand for education while having to remold its education system in the light of economic, industrial, and social change. The reforms that emerged from these considerations were comprehensive and wide ranging. Secondary education underwent root and branch reorganization. So, too, did higher education. If the drive for reform in higher education began well before the uproar of May 1968, the events of that date ushered in what may be seen as one of the most sustained efforts by a Western European government to deal with the pressures and contradictions arising out of the transition from an elite to a mass based system of higher education.

During the past twenty-five years or so, scarcely any minister of education has passed up the opportunity to associate his name with educational reforms that have had equally varying degrees of radicalism and success. Berthoin (1959), Fouchet (1963), Fontanet (1974), Haby (1975), and Beullac (1978)—such is the litany of secondary education. To this war memorial of past reforms one might add the names of Edgar Faure (1968), father of the Higher Education Guideline Law of that year (current revisions of which have given rise to much parading and shouting between the Bastille and the Gare d’Austerlitz), Mme Alice Saunier Seité (1976), and finally, the present incumbent, M. Alain Savary. The unhappy M. Savary faces a coincidence of reforms at all levels of the education system: the internal structures of lower secondary education (the Legrand Commission Report); changes in the relationship between the private—more accurately termed, the nonstate—sector of both primary and secondary schooling;¹ the redefinition of the structures and objectives of undergraduate study; and last but not least, changes to the balance of power in the internal governance of universities.

Comprehensive though these reforms have been, their strategy tends to differ from the more usual one found in other countries, notably in the Federal Republic of Germany and in Sweden. The difference resides in one outstanding feature. In no way did any of these transformations ever pose a threat to those parts of French education which are intimately associated with the raising and eventual training of the country’s administrative, economic, and political elites. Without exception, both in secondary and higher education, reform applied to nonelite institutions. In secondary education, for example, the key institution, the classes préparatoires des grandes écoles, have remained untouched. To be sure, the numbers of students entering them have increased. But their prestige and their highly selective nature (one being closely related to the other) are untarnished. Their position across that golden road to posts of high preferment is as commanding as ever it was. The same may be said for the grandes écoles, that truly elite sector of French higher education, to which the classes préparatoires are linked both by their curriculum and by their structural relationships. The uproar and protestation that accompanied the overhaul of French higher education left them an oasis of tranquility, unmentioned in the Higher Education Guideline Law of 1968. The past ten years have, if anything, seen the prestige and attractiveness of the grandes écoles increase by leaps and bounds. In part this is owing to the rigorous selection they continue to impose on candidates, in part to the widely held conviction that the training they give is more relevant to the needs of high-level technocracy, administration, and management in both the public and the private sectors of the nation’s economy.

Thus, the particular strategy that successive French governments have endorsed may have enabled the country to meet the apparently irreconcilable demands of preserving excellence, on the one hand, while responding to the tidal wave of individual demand for higher education on the other. But the consequences of such a policy are particularly marked. The already highly segmented nature of French higher education has been increased still further. Viewed from a long-range perspective, such a strategy has effectively transferred upward toward higher education the high level of institutional and curricular stratification which traditionally characterized French secondary schooling.

The French Education System: Today and Yesterday

As in the United Kingdom, Sweden, Denmark, and Norway, the thrust of reform in French secondary education has involved a gradual move toward a pattern of all in schooling, based on catchment areas (carte scolaire). Pupils of a given age range attend the same school, at least through the end of the compulsory education period. Beginning at age eleven plus, secondary education is grounded on a middle and upper school pattern. The age range eleven to fifteen constitutes the first cycle of secondary schooling and takes place in so-called colleges. Upper secondary schooling, known as the second cycle, is split between two separate types of schools. The first, the lycée, covers the age range fifteen plus to nineteen. It leads to the baccalauréat (the academic, school-leaving certificate), which is general in nature, to the technician’s baccalauréat, or to the technician’s certificate (brevêt de technicien). Official terminology calls this long-cycle secondary education, and although legally there is held to be no disparity of esteem between long- and short-cycle upper secondary schooling, it is nevertheless true that the overwhelming majority of students in higher education pass through the long-cycle lycée. Its companion establishment, the two-year lycée d’enseignement professionnel, for ages fifteen to seventeen, provides a course that has, principally, a vocational or practical bent. There is, however, a high degree of segmentation within the vocational area between the brevêt d’études professionnelles and the certificat d’aptitude professionnelle (the vocational skills certificate). The former qualifies a pupil to exercise a series of occupations linked to a particular sector of the economy—industrial, commercial, administrative, or social. The industrial sector contains at present some thirty-eight different qualifications, and the services sector a further eight.² The latter certificate is less a generic than a specialist qualification and is intended to attest to a pupil’s capacity to perform a particular job. In 1981 there were 260 different specialties, 233 corresponding to the industrial and 27 to the service sector of the labor force. In both cases these qualifications lead on to blue-collar jobs of a skilled or semiskilled nature.

Thus, a clear stratification exists between the type of skills fostered in the lycée d’enseignement professionnel and those imparted in the lycée. Recent reforms have sought to soften this distinction by providing certain facilities for particularly able pupils to switch tracks in the lycée d’enseignement professionnel. Students presenting the certificat d’aptitude professionnelle are permitted the possibility of moving into a special transfer class (seconde spéciale) in the long-cycle lycée. Here, after three years, they may qualify to sit for the technician’s baccalauréat or diploma. There are similar openings for the more successful candidates of the brevêt;³ their preparation time for the technician’s baccalauréat is one year shorter.

The current structures of French secondary education were put in place by the law of 11 July 1975, the last in a long line of reforms that had the effect of moving up, to a later academic stage in the life of the student, the historic pattern of secondary education usually found in Western European countries, namely, a system of vertically differentiated types of schools—academic, technical, and vocational—which admit pupils starting at age eleven. Although French secondary school reforms did not reach the degree of curricular and structural integration found in either Sweden or Norway, for example,⁴ the move toward the comprehensive model in France was certainly more wide-ranging than its British counterpart. External structural change went hand in hand with the inner organizational reform of the school. Both the creation of more flexible student groupings and the remolding of the curriculum were integral parts of the French strategy of innovation and were not treated separately as they had been in Britain.⁵

The intellectual origins of the integrated secondary school in France go back to the end of the First World War, when the idea of creating one school for all (école unique) was first mooted by a body calling itself Les Compagnons de lf Université Nouvelle.⁶ The idea received further backing toward the end of